Historically, the electronic noise, generated within the sample, has not been encoded during the Magnetic Resonance imaging (MRI) process and the pulse sequences and gradient encoding have not encoded the noise. However, the new methods of partially paralleled imaging, for example SENSE and SMASH, demonstrate that the probe sensitivity patterns can be considered encoding functions, and these encoding functions are different from traditional methods. The sensitivity patterns can encode the noise to approximately the same extent that they encode the signal. This is true because the electronic thermal noise of the tissue is normally dominant and the physical size and structure of the coil dictate the acquisition site of the “body” noise. Although the regions of MRI signal acquisition and noise acquisition are similar they are not the same, because the probe's magnetic field is associated with signal acquisition, for example MRI signal acquisition, whereas the probe's electric field is associated with noise acquisition. If several probes and receiver channels are used in MRI signal acquistion, the noise in a given channel can be assumed to be significantly localized by the electric field description of the probe associated with that channel. This indicates that noise can have some information content associated with it, since the noise originates in tissues of the body and is acquired in a predictable way via a local probe. Noise can have an associated spatial encoding capability. This association can exist when the noise originates in tissues of the body and is acquired in a predictable and repeatable way by means of a local probe. The subject Magnetic Resonance Noise Tomography (MR-NT) technique can extend this to measuring the covariances of noise within a multiple receiver system. This is important because, in principle, the amount of non-sample noise is largely irrelevant since correlating the two noise outputs greatly reduces or eliminates the uncorrelated noise via averaging.